Nine sings as Ten cooks

Shine director Paul Franklin on the set of Masterchef. Although Shine owns the show, this is the first season it has produced; it’s like coming home, Franklin says.
Photo Lee Besford

by
Ben Holgate

TV viewers’ love of gourmet cooking will be tested over the next week as Ten Network launches the new MasterChef series in direct competition with Nine’s hit talent quest show The Voice.

Ten begins the fourth season of MasterChef, which aims to make its contestants the best amateur chefs in the country, on Sunday. The network is hoping to equal or better the show’s audience average of 1.6 million viewers last year. Struggling Ten has a lot riding on the program, which generated about 9 per cent of its TV revenue last year.

But The Voice has thrown up stiff competition for the cooking show by attracting up to 2.7 million viewers a night, helping Nine break Seven’s long-standing ratings dominance.

Nine is set to win its third ratings week in a row, due to The Voice and its halo, which has spread to other Nine shows such as The Block.

Presiding over both MasterChef and The Voice is Shine Australia, which is producing the two shows. Shine was built up by
Elisabeth Murdoch
before she sold the business to her family’s media company,
News Corp
, last year.

Although Shine owns the format rights to MasterChef with Ziji Productions, it is the first time it has produced the show in Australia. The first three seasons were produced by Fremantle Media, which had the licence for that period.

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He says a big shift in the show from last year is to get away from “big and epic" stunts, such as cooking at the United Nations, and return to a focus on food – from meals worthy of a five-star restaurant to those whipped up at home.

The genial trio of hosts – George Calombaris, Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston – will be back but there will be subtle evolutions in the format.

Ten’s executive producer of entertainment, Paul Leadon, says the immunity challenge, which allows one contestant each week to win the right to be excluded from elimination, is now being run by chef
Matt Moran
.

In the immunity challenge, this contestant will choose their own team to assist in competing against a professional chef and, in addition, their sous chef.

In previous seasons, the weekly immunity challenge pitched a single contestant against a single chef. “It’s a lot harder now," Leadon says.

The master class, in which the hosts pass on techniques, has also changed so that, in the following week, contestants can use the techniques learned in competition.

On Friday, the contestants and the crew flew out to Italy for a week. The production has also travelled to Tasmania and to Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The latter was a tie-in with a new sponsor, the South Australian Tourism Commission.

Ten’s chief sales officer, Mike Morrison, says integration of sponsor products or services into the show and on digital platforms is key to driving revenue, but with a golden rule. “The ways in which we incorporate products are part of the entertainment," he says. “It’s become a real creative area."

Coles has dominated product placement in previous years.

Morrison says Ten is on track to book more sponsorship revenue for MasterChef than last year. While he declines to specify a number, industry sources estimate MasterChef in 2011 generated more than $80 million in total advertising revenue, including sponsorships, partnerships, casual ad packages and spot buys. This represented about 9 per cent of Ten’s overall TV revenue in the 2011 financial year.

Ten chief executive
James Warburton
said last month that Ten was moving away from “the one bet, one punch mentality" it has had over the years, relying on long-running franchises such as MasterChef, Australian Idol and Big Brother. The network is about to launch four new local shows.

But media buyer Steve Allen says MasterChef “is everything". “This is where they [Ten] start their run back, and they have to get the figures they got last year," the Fusion Strategy managing director says.

Fortunately for Ten, the return of its six-nights-a-week show coincides with Nine dropping The Voice to one night, on Mondays. No doubt cooks, singers and network execs will all be feeling the heat.